We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves [Unabridged] [Audible Audio Edition] Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00D1YRT8S | Format: PDF, EPUB
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From the New York Times-best-selling author of The Jane Austen Book Club, the story of an American family, middle class in middle America, ordinary in every way but one. But that exception is the beating heart of this extraordinary novel.
Meet the Cooke family: Mother and Dad, brother Lowell, sister Fern, and our narrator, Rosemary, who begins her story in the middle. She has her reasons. "I spent the first eighteen years of my life defined by this one fact: that I was raised with a chimpanzee," she tells us. "It's never going to be the first thing I share with someone. I tell you Fern was a chimp and already you aren't thinking of her as my sister. But until Fern's expulsion, I'd scarcely known a moment alone. She was my twin, my funhouse mirror, my whirlwind other half, and I loved her as a sister."
Rosemary was not yet six when Fern was removed. Over the years, she's managed to block a lot of memories. She's smart, vulnerable, innocent, and culpable. With some guile, she guides us through the darkness, penetrating secrets and unearthing memories, leading us deeper into the mystery she has dangled before us from the start. Stripping off the protective masks that have hidden truths too painful to acknowledge, in the end, "Rosemary" truly is for remembrance.
Direct download links available for Download We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves [Unabridged] [Audible Audio Edition]
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 8 hours and 57 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Penguin Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: May 30, 2013
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00D1YRT8S
"We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves" is one of the most unusual, engaging and genuinely moving novels that has come around in a long, long time. Think "Shipping News" meets "Poisonwood Bible," and shaded with Karen Joy Fowler's unique voice and talent, and you have an idea of the literate and storytelling power of this book.
There's an inherent dilemma in talking about Fowler's new novel: it's built around a secret. Or, more accurately, a reveal. And though knowing the twist in advance doesn't diminish the story, it won't be disclosed here: no spoiler alert.
On the surface, the novel is about the Cookes of Bloomington, Indiana (where Fowler spent the first 11 years of her life). This unconventional, dysfunctional family consists of a pedantic psychologist father who specializes in animal behavior, an emotionally fragile mother and three children: Lowell, Rosemary and Fern.
One daughter mysteriously vanishes, the other changes from a prodigiously talkative child to a silent adult; the brother runs away. And beneath the basic plotline lies a story as fantastic, terrible and beautiful as any Grimm's fairy tale.
Reading Fowler's novel is like looking at a photo album as someone else turns the pages, back and forth and often several at a time. The all-too-human Cooke family comes into focus through this fluid, time-tripping technique, unearthing memories and mysteries along the way. Jealousy glitters as a recurring theme, along with fairness, unconditional love, animal rights and the power of language.
Rosemary, the relentlessly direct voice of the novel, explains up front that she's starting her story in the middle: it's 1996, and she's a 22-year-old student at the University of California, Davis.
There's a twist in Karen Joy Fowler's new novel, but you probably already know about it. The cover copy gives it away, and I imagine most reviews will too. This one certainly will, in the next paragraph, because you can't really discuss the book without doing so. But if by some miracle you don't know already, you might want to read WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY BESIDE OURSELVES before you find out. If so, let me just say that it's definitely a novel I recommend, funny and well-observed and briskly paced. The ending may be a little too upbeat and consoling, but Fowler arranges things carefully so the consolation doesn't cloy and the whiff of middlebrow sentimentality never becomes more than a whiff. There are a lot of books out there about middle-class dysfunction, and despite its novel conceit this one doesn't break new thematic ground, but its small insights and crisp prose make it worth reading all the same.
Rosemary Cooke's life changed forever when she was five and her sister Fern disappeared. In the aftermath of that loss, the family splintered, and older brother Lowell eventually ran away from home. So far so typical-- it might be the ORDINARY PEOPLE of the early 21st century- but here's the thing: Fern was a chimpanzee, brought into the Cooke home as part of a scientific experiment. The fact that she was no less a sister to Rosemary, and her absence no less devastating, suggests the central issue of WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY BESIDE OURSELVES, namely the thinness of the differences between human beings and animals, and the moral consequences of that thinness for animal experimentation. That makes the book sound heavy, but it isn't.
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